Conference of Badasht

The gathering at Badasht in the summer of 1848 assembled roughly eighty leading Babis, and its ostensible purpose was practical: what to do about the Bab, who was imprisoned. What it is remembered for is a single act. Tahirih, a poet and theologian who was among the Bab's earliest and most learned followers, appeared before the assembled men without her veil.

Peter Smith's account records the shock this produced, including one man who cut his own throat and fled. The act was read, and was intended to be read, as a declaration rather than a personal liberty: if the law of Islam no longer bound the community, then the Bab's revelation was not a reform within Shia Islam but a new dispensation with its own law. Everything that had been ambiguous about the movement's status was made explicit in a moment that required no theological argument to understand. The atlas records the episode as it is reported in Babi and Baha'i historical writing and in the scholarship that draws on it. Tahirih was later executed, in 1852, in the general suppression that followed the attempt on the Shah's life, and she is remembered in Baha'i tradition as the first woman to give her life for the cause. Her unveiling at Badasht remains the single most cited episode of the whole Babi period, and it is cited for the same reason it shocked the men who witnessed it: it settled a doctrinal question by making it visible.

Badasht did not produce agreement. The gathering split over how far the break with Islamic law should be carried, with Quddus, one of the Bab's eighteen Letters of the Living, and Tahirih taking positions that the accounts present as opposed, and a number of those present leaving. The man who had organised and partly financed the gathering, and who later took the name Baha'u'llah, is described in Baha'i sources as having worked to hold the two sides together and as having given each of the participants a new name during the conference.

Historians of the movement treat Badasht as one of the points, alongside the Bab's own escalating claims made from prison in the same period, after which Babism could no longer be understood as a current within Twelver Shia Islam. The atlas records the conference under the Babi movement rather than under the Baha'i Faith, which did not yet exist, and notes that the Baha'i and Azali branches that later divided the Babi community each read the events of 1848 in their own way. What is not disputed is that the gathering happened, roughly who was there, and that the question it raised was settled by an act rather than by a text. The atlas therefore records the conference as attested and the detailed accounts of what was said at it as coming from partisan sources written afterwards.